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The Flair Of A Penn
02/15/2000 9:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
David John Farinella
Even after his big-screen debut in
Boogie Nights,
Michael Penn is not anxious to return to acting. "I didn't feel particularly comfortable," Penn says from his Los Angeles home. "I think I would feel less nervous about it if I did it more." Alas, those clamoring for the Michael Penn mug to reappear in a theater near you will have to wait.
Of course, that doesn't mean his actor brother, Christopher, can't come in and sing a bit. "Chris will sing for you," Michael says with a laugh. "He sings blues in bars." But is he supposed to? "If he has a drink or two, he'll get up and sing for you. He just has a way of convincing the band to ask him to come up onstage."
Christopher also apparently had a way of convincing his brother to ask him to come sing on Michael's latest release,
MP4 (Days Since A Lost Time Accident). But the new album's principal virtues have little to do with celebrity cameos. Mostly produced by Michael himself, MP4 is chock full of classic pop with a distinct Penn flair, covering a variety of subjects, including the state of mankind ("Lucky One"), finding that special someone ("Perfect Candidate"), and a relationship in flames ("Bucket Brigade").
Even with those personal touchstones as topics, Penn doesn't feel like he's trying to save the world with his lyrics. "Yeah, Jesus," he says. "I hate it when I see people trying to do that." He pauses for a second and then adds, "I'm trying to figure out my own life, and look at the world and people around me, and see the struggles and see the great stuff, and just try to find little ways into discussing some of those things with myself and allow that to be an accessible conversation."
He may not have been able to produce Dirk Diggler's shelved album in Boogie Nights--an observation that he concedes with a laugh--but Penn enjoyed producing his own record. "I had a blast. I've always been involved in my productions, but to have the responsibility of actually being the producer was interesting because it was nothing I had ever done before. I learned a lot from Brendan [O'Brien], I learned a lot from Tony Berg [both of whom produced previous Penn albums], and I figured, 'Oh, I could do this.'" Not only did he use those lessons on his own release, but he's currently in the middle of producing the
Wallflowers' next opus.
This confident and capable Michael Penn is not the same Michael Penn we first heard on his 1989 debut,
March. A song off that album, "No Myth," made a top 40 splash, but Penn says he felt no pressure to live up to that success. "I didn't even understand what that was," he says. "To me, that was a fluke hit. I certainly think there were things off of
Resigned
[Penn's third album, from 1997] that could have been as big a hit if it was time for a fluke hit from me, if I was younger. There was nothing calculated about that, there was nothing calculated about anything else."
While we're on the subject of calculation, Penn has come to some ugly conclusions about the commerce of music. "The business part is not about the music," he observes with a touch of resignation in his voice. "Don't kid yourself. It's not even accurate to say it's about money; it's about games and politics and egos and a lot of different things, but definitely not the music. That's disheartening because I retained at least the illusion that at one time it was."
Some of what gave him that illusion was the state of the music scene up to 1972--"pre-Frampton and pre-Fleetwood Mac, pre-blockbuster," he explains. "The exposure to music for people at large was a lot freer and a lot better. People had choices about what they could listen to and it wasn't so narrowly categorized. Now it's been a process of segmenting; it's like breeding cats, you know, they've inbred so many styles with each other. Now we have a real damaged breed and it's just sad to me."
Part of the remedy, he suggests, is for individual bands to get out and tour the country on their own, "saying, 'Let's get in the van and play everywhere we can and let's get the word out ourselves.' People have been doing it a long time, but now it seems like it's the only real way because record companies are not your allies." This is not just theory in Penn's eyes; he and his wife
Aimee Mann, who's experienced her own tussles with the industry, will be putting it into practice soon, hitting the road for a small club tour.
On this tour, Penn will be offering up songs from each of his four major-label releases, including MP4 (Days Since A Lost Time Accident). Regarding that funny title, it doesn't really make sense unless you're staring at the album cover. Penn explains: "I was doing some overdubs in a studio in Burbank and I was staring at a sign [outside]. I looked at my watch and realized I had been staring at this sign for a half-hour because I was reading it over and over again in my brain. It said, 'Days Since A Lost Time Accident.' It was a phrase that just got me into a loop and I didn't understand it. So I provided that sign [on the cover] for all to behold."
Under the nebulous phrase, which was located at the Burbank Public Works office, were listed the various administrative departments of the town. "From sanitation to streets to lights to this to that," he recalls. "It just didn't click for me." And did it after a half-hour? "Oh, yeah. I finally went, 'Ohhh.' I was in some [science fiction writer] Whitely Striber land, like lost time." Glad he made it back.
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